Great Western Coffee Shop

Today I picked up a pre-paid ticket from one of the TVMs at Temple Meads. It's a single from Birmingham New St back to Bristol for few days from now, but I wanted to pick it up early from here so as to minimise time there; partly because it's just easier but also because it's good to spend as little time as possible in Mordor Central! The ticket included a bicycle reservation (one reason it's easier to pick it up now, without a laden bike to handle at the same time) and that was the part that came out of the machine weirdly. A cycle reservation consists of two pieces of card, one to attach to the bike and one passenger copy. The passenger copy had the correct train details but the "attach to cycle" card had the departure and destination reversed! That is, it said I was going from BRI to BHM. The train time and date were correct and the numbers match on all three pieces of orange card. I went into the Travel Centre, where an extremely nice lady printed a sheet of paper for me with the correct details on it and a note that it was an "issuing error with the self service ticket machine".

She said she'd never seen anything like it before. Has anyone encountered or heard of this type of error previously?

'Yorkie' on rail forums had the same thing when he bought his bike along to a rail forums outing in Cornwall towards the end of July.

It occurred to me it could be that those machines are set up so the departure of the cycle reservation is automatically the 'home' station; except it can't be that because the other card of the cycle reservation was correct. And anyway, why on earth would they be set up like that?  ???

Hope Yorkie got his bike to Cornwall alright!

He had no problem. It's clearly an error as there is no xx:xx from x to y, but there is from y to x